In an ideal world Google Photos, iCloud Photos, MyCloud (Swisscom) and other photo backup solutions would back up your photos into a directory structure that you can access and download from with ease and convenience. Unfortunately non of them want to offer that. That is why finding a workflow to get data out is worthwhile.
Remember, a cloud solution, where you can’t get media files back out, is not a backup solution.
Yesterday I started the proper migration of my Google Photo assets from Google Takeout to PhotoPrism. The first step was to mount the drives to the linux system, the second was to transfer the photos from the external hard drive to the internal SD card, unzip them, and then start imposing assets.
The first bottle neck is exporting 800 gigabytes from Google drive to a local drive. I chose to download the files in one gigabyte packages in fifty gigabyte sets over many hours.
While playing with Nextcloud I found a serious flaw. If you add images via the command line from one directory to another, and then delete them, then their ghosts remain in the timeline. By ghosts I mean references to these files in the CMS and there is no quick way of removing them. You need to remove them individually and that’s time consuming. That’s why, when I was trying to find a solution I came across Photoprism.